Swiss mother cuts baby's throat after arrest in Spain

A 40-year-old Swiss mother killed her sick, 10-month-old baby boy by cutting his throat while she was under under arrest in Spain, police said Thursday.

Despite being under police detention at a hospital in the southeastern Spanish coastal city of Torrevieja, she managed to trick officers to carry out the act, a Spanish police spokesman said.

"She cut his neck with a kitchen knife and then cut her own neck. Her prognosis is serious. The injury to her neck is serious," the spokesman said.

"She said she was going to bathe him or change his diaper. She took advantage of that momen to kill him," he added.

"The policeman with her saw her making strange movements and intervened. He saw she had cut the baby's neck and was trying to cut her own. It was all in the same movement. She managed to cut her own throat but his intervention prevented it going deeper."

Swiss police had issued an international arrest after the woman took her baby from the centre he was being cared for in the canton of Zurich on Christmas Eve.

The woman had lost custody of her son, he said.

Spanish police detained the woman at a Carrefour supermarket in Torrevieja on Wednesday after she had been spotted by someone in the city.

Police had taken her and the child to a hospital so that the baby could be treated for hydrocephalus, in which a build-up of water pressures the brain.